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THE ROAD TO GO PRO: A NEW ARRA

By 1981 the sham of amateurism, which began in the late 19th century as a means to segregate sport along social and economic lines, was too obvious to ignore and too constricting to let stand. Road running’s promise was great, but the top athletes were frustrated by the hypocritical status of their “shamateur” sport which looked the other way as appearance fees were paid to a few high profile athletes, notably American marathoners Frank Shorter and Bill Rodgers, while the majority of contending runners like Herb Lindsay and Greg Meyer, for instance, took home little or nothing even if they won. For their part, Rodgers and Shorter were unable to cash in on their deserved recognition via open market forces. So the athletes began to meet at events around the country in order to formulate a plan of action.

After numerous such gatherings in 1980 and `81, the Association of Road Race Athletes (ARRA), the so-called athlete’s union, was created to challenge the IAAF’s prohibitive control of their career opportunities (Rule 53). The first race where this challenge was openly exercised came in June 1981 at the Nike sponsored Cascade Run Off15K in Portland, Oregon.

In the wake of the Cascade breakaway America’s amateur governing body for running, The Athletics Congress (now USA Track & Field), suspended some sixty athletes, and threatened suspension for any other athletes competing in subsequent, TAC-sanctioned events against these “professionals”. This was the federation’s stick, eligibility for national championships and Olympic competition. But the athletes hung together, accepted their suspensions, and worked to attract allies to their cause.

WHERE WOMEN BLOW AND MEN THUNDER

An important battlefield in this political campaign played out inside the New Zealand federation, the NZAAA. Three New Zealand women, Anne Audain (the Cascade winner), Allison Roe (the `81 Boston Marathon champion), and Lorraine Moller, each accepted prize money at Cascade. All three were subsequently banned internationally by their federation, though Allison Roe turned back her money and was reinstated at that time. Anne Audain picks up the narrative from there.

“The U.S. athletes were only suspended, because of their constitutional rights,” said Audain. “We, on the other hand, had no such rights in New Zealand, and TAC executive director Ollan Cassell, who bragged about this to me at the Stapleton Airport in Denver in 1982, got the NZAAA to ban Lorraine and me internationally. We weren’t allowed to run. So Lorraine and I returned to New Zealand and had a go at the federation. Lorraine brought a lawyer with her.

“We threatened that if the federation didn’t stand by us in this matter we wouldn’t run for New Zealand ever again. Remember, that the Commonwealth Games were scheduled for Brisbane, Australia in 1982. We told the NZAAA that if they didn’t reinstate us for domestic competition we would go to the track and run the necessary qualifying times for the Games in front of all the media. Then if they didn’t put us on the team they would look like a bunch of fools, because we were by far the best women runners in the country with the best chance for medals, and the public was very much behind us. It was basically a bluff, but within ten minutes they did reinstate us for New Zealand competitions, and that forced the IAAF eventually to reinstate us as well.”

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Back in the United States the next major test for the ARRA athletes came, as if by providence, in Flint, Michigan at the Bobby Crim 10 Miler. The city of Flint had mid-wifed the birth of the United Auto Workers Union (UAW) in 1935. Consequently, Crim officials took the position in 1981 that the ARRA athletes were, in essence, trade unionists coalescing around a right to work issue. Crim linked ARRA’s fight to their own history as a union town, and ARRA had another ally in its corner. The suspended athletes would be allowed to run.

With sixty athletes, two major events, and the lifted ban in New Zealand lining up behind the ARRA challenge, TAC executive director Ollan Cassell received a clear directive from the international federation, IAAF, to clean up the mess on the roads in the USA. In response Cassell hired a Long Island-based lawyer and recreational runner, Alvin Chriss, in July of `81.

Chriss wrote, and then was hired to administer, TAC TRUST, a semantic money-laundering device developed in conjunction with Frank Shorter and Steve Bosley at the Bank of Boulder to combat the Eastern Bloc’s state support of athletes. TAC TRUST dispensed prize money to ARRA racers as “training expenses”, which was an acceptable veil to the worldwide federations, even as the world remained bifurcated along the super-power axis. Such was the evolution of the sport in America, and thus did the modern era of semi-pro road racing begin.

7 thoughts on “THE ROAD TO GO PRO: A NEW ARRA”

Right you are Bob, the Jordache business deal and motivation for involvement to our sport during this time was for profit. Can not fault them for that! However,that was US Road Racing athletes problem … No interest in profit to runners, and a NGB that had no idea of the national popularity of road running. We were “rock and roll” … And Track & Field was a waltz! I’ve said it 100 times, we should have broken away from the handcuffs of a hypocritical “amateur athletics” system then … Instead USA road running today is dominated by fund raising, making money and creating support for everything but our own sport!

As a young and very low-level runner in those days (early 80s) I was fascinated by, but almost completely ignorant of, these developments (no internet, no bloggers, plenty of rumors), so it’s really interesting to me to read some of what was necessary to bring competitive running out of the dark ages and to have some of that mystery resolved. Clearly there were great runners then who had to break through massive barriers to pave the way for future elites to have a chance to prosper. May the great sport of road racing survive and thrive.

Yes, they broke through, but they didn’t go far enough, and the momentum was lost when the ARRA athletes abdicated their organization to the race directors who turned away from all appearance fees in favor of open prize money. What they needed was a combination of both, but their decision would eventually replace the star runners of the `70s and 80s with an unregulated deluge of Kenyan runners who contributed nothing to the endeavor. I can’t blame them. It’s the event organizers who allowed the virus of disinterest to infect the sport. Now, like AIDS in the early 80’s the disease has proved fatal to the sport as fun runs, color runs, etc. have replaced racing at the heart of road running.

There is merit to Tom Fleming’s comments but Jordache and supporting infrastructure did not have enough vision and running community political inroads to support their program. Also their primary interest was profit.

Jordache race series was the first pro marathon with prize money .. ARRA was not as organized as people are led to believe…there were a few athletes that wanted it both ways … “Prize money and appearance fees” … The sport wasn’t ready for that mixture yet! I had the best “deal” … Advert on media and TV commercial. That plus two large marathon prize “pay days” in both AC and LA … they treated me like a pro and pay me like one too!